Substituting & Converting Recipes with Gluten Free All Purpose Flour

It’s not a stretch to convert, substitute, and use gluten free flour in recipes where typical wheat derived all purpose flour is called for. Whether you’ve just gone gluten-free and want to bake an old favorite cake recipe, or just discovered the plethora of gluten-free recipes online, here’s a quick how-to on using The Little Aussie Bakery’s All Purpose Flour in your baking.

The Little Aussie Bakery’s All-Purpose Flour

ABOUT:Our All-Purpose Flour is a blend of high quality gluten-free flours and ideal for making gluten-free cakes, cookies, and almost anything that calls for regular all purpose flour to be used. You will need to add guar gum to our flour blend to make an absolute substitute of Little Aussie Gluten-Free Flour in recipes using standard All-Purpose Flour.

To make it a Self-Rising or Cake Flour:Add 1 tsp Baking Power to every 1 Cup of Flour

In other words, recipes found in a standard, non-GF friendly cookbook that call for All-Purpose Flour can be converted into gluten-free versions using our GF blend (contingent that the rest of the ingredients are also gluten-free), BUT you will need to add guar gum to our flour blend for an absolute substitute of the standard flour.

>>If the recipe is already written/developed specifically to be gluten-free, and includes guar gum or xantham gum, no additional guar gum (as described above for converting non-GF recipes) needs to be added. You may simply follow the recipe as written!

Why Guar Gum? We use guar gum because it’s a more affordable, reliable option than Xanthan Gum, the other, alternative gum frequently called for/used in gluten-free baking and cooking. You can read about the difference between Xanthan and Guar gums to learn more. So what do these gums do for baking? A post from Teri Gruss, MS on glutenfreecooking.about.com explains it well:

“Gums are “hydrocolloidals.” They attract water, bind, thicken and emulsify gluten-free ingredients. If you don’t add gum to most gluten-free baked goods, especially breads, you are apt to end up with a crumbly dry disappointment.”

Standard, wheat-derived flours inherently perform this, because that’s essentially what properties gluten protein provides. Therefore, the binding and emulsifying agent has to be introduced (via gums and starches) to baking with gluten-free flours.